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Monday, April 10, 2017

Let's Not Become Victims

Last Tuesday was the celebration (?) of women not being paid
as much as men.It seems odd that people
would go out of their way to make themselves feel bad, but that’s the way it
is.Maybe taking on the status of
victimhood draws sympathy or gives one a chance to express pent up anger and
resentment, but it doesn’t really do anything to solve the problem.What’s worse was the blatant exaggeration to
make the point – 20% indeed!

But that’s what politicians were telling us last summer and for many years, and
there is no reason to change the story now.CBS proudly reported:“The
gender pay gap is a well documented phenomenon” according to a new study by an
organization called Glassdoor. The
lead was that a survey of half a million people in America revealed that a
woman earn 76 cents for every dollar a man earns.But they then added, the “statistic may be slightly misleading, in that
it doesn't compare men and women on an apples-to-apples basis, such as
comparing women with similar levels of education and experience with men in the
same situation.”Later in the article
this apples-to-apples comparison yields a real difference of 5.4%.Another source using similar calculations had
come up with about 1% less.

In a different article they elaborate on this:“Yet even when controlled for those
factors and other issues (such as employers and job titles), women earn more
than 5 percent less than men.”So where
does the 20% number come from, except from an attempt to purposely make the gap
look a lot worse by using an invalid comparison? Apparently trying to soften this discrepancy,
they argue:“Male preschool and
kindergarten teachers earn $16.33 per hour, compared with $14.42 per hour for
their female counterparts.”Instead of providing
further evidence for a deliberate gap, this should strike us as odd.Don’t almost all kindergarten teachers belong
to a union that negotiates wages for schoolteachers?I’m sure their contracts don’t say, “Just pay
the guys a little more.” As an attempted example of a valid comparison, this statistic
is incredible.

Yet people continue to make these false claims about the
size of the gap, despite the ease of finding information like this from Forbes
to clearly explain the misconceptions, both from faulty calculations and from
poor understanding of the situation.“President
John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act in 1963, making sex-based
discrimination in pay illegal.”We don’t
need more laws; we need better enforcement.The government is quick to point out to a business owner when there are
fewer than the required number of handicap parking spaces, but for nine
presidential administrations this wage-gap problem persists.

Of course advertisers have been jumping on the bandwagon to
promote the falsehood.Several businesses
showed support by offering a 20% discount for women on the wage-gap “holiday”
last week.Some say those businesses are
doing this to “try to raise awareness” about the unfairness.Get real! – They are not trying to raise awareness;
they are trying to sell stuff and to develop a base of loyal customers.

Now it’s not right that any woman with the same background
and experience should be paid less than any man for doing exactly the same job.Until the 4% or 5% becomes zero the problem
is not solved.(Nor would it be right if
positions were reversed.)However, it’s
also not right to intentionally mislead women by exaggerating the size of the problem
as a ploy to gain support for political or commercial gain.

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About Me

is highly qualified to comment on the connection between our behavioral choices and the results we get. His formal education and training in observing and classifying behavior is supported by more than 40 years of practical business experience and 10 years of personal research. He is a West Point graduate with two Master’s degrees in business.
He is also a published author, Master Gardener and RYT200 yoga teacher.